Home
by kickstand75
Summary: Arya Stark makes a surprising return home after five years of exploring.


Her thick fur-lined boots made hardly a sound stepping off the plank of her ship. A five year absence from any consistent daily training had not diminished Arya Stark's skills for moving silently when she wished. It was a brisk dawn in Hardhome's newly christened harbor and many would likely call it more than brisk, but not Arya. It didn't matter how many summer isles she had seen, or how many woodland green forests, there was no place like the North in mid-April.

She moved silently from ship to land hoping to surprise the still mostly sleeping port town. Five years was an enormous time to be without family and lately she had yearned to return home. She had thought a life of adventure and freedom were the only dreams in her heart, but it would seem that wasn't so.

_The first time a raven had shown up on the ship's prow, many of her crew wanted to capture and kill it. But Arya had recognized something in its gaze and in the few days it stayed to observe them, she took to talking to it. To telling the intelligent animal of her adventures, from the wild and misshapen still smoking ruins in one land, to the fantastical large shelled creatures they had spied swimming off one summer isle. She told it of her discovery of a potential new land west of Westeros and how they had decided to leave it alone because of the silent fierce faces they had spied on the sandy shores. The raven returned many times over the course of five years, and Arya and it always had long one-sided conversations of her latest adventure._

_In the last five months or so, the raven had stopped visiting and she had felt a shift in the wind, a familiar wistful scent, and she had dreamed of a hall warmed by fire, and a hot spring pond under golden leaves. She dreamed of home and her sister, and brothers. Faces dear, not dimmed in her mind's eye, by the passing of five years. And so she gave the order to turn the ship towards home. _

Arya slipped through the Wildling town and found the home she assumed was her brothers. It was spare on the outside, the only decoration a threadbare Stark direwolf pendant attached to the roof's overhang. She quietly opened the door, and slid out Needle from its scabbard and pointed it at Jon, before making a low growl deep in her throat.

"What the fuck!" Jon yelled, as he jumped from his tangled furs and promptly fell on his arse. Arya laughed at the shock on her brother's face as he realized it was not actually a wolf or Tormund playing a prank on him using his own Longclaw pointed at him to keep him on his toes with training. His wild eyes calmed and a genuine smile lit up his face.

"Arya. What? How? We thought you gone for good? We've heard of all your explorations and believed we wouldn't see you again." He continued, a sheen of tears in his eyes, shock giving way movement as he maneuvered to his beloved littlest sister for a fierce hug.

"I thought I was going for good too." Arya's own tears coming now in response to how good and right it felt to be hugged by family again. "But I found that sometimes adventuring and freedom are only half way good when you don't have the ones you love to share it with. So I came home. You were closest to where we were when I gave the order, so I started by coming here to Hardhome."

They broke off the hug, and Jon tugged Arya by the hand, "Come on, then, let's go see what's for breakfast. I've heard the cooks have been busy baking fresh breads and pastries for days now due to an important visitor we have coming two days from now." Arya looked at Jon, one brow quirked up, the question unspoken.

Jon smiled wide at this familiar gesture, and replied, "Aye, you'll see. Tomorrow, a queen is visiting her brother for the first time in five years and has a new niece she wants me to meet. What she doesn't know is that I'm going to have quite the surprise of my own to show her! After breakfast, what do you say we see how we can disguise your ship so Sansa doesn't know you've come home."

Home, thought Arya, wasn't strictly defined by four walls or even a specific land. It was here, in Jon's wink at her when planning a prank on their sister. It would be here tomorrow with Sansa and her new baby. It would be waiting for her in King's Landing when she made her way South eventually to see Bran.

She whispered to herself as Jon opened the door to Hardhome's communal kitchen, "A girl is Arya Stark, and she is home."


End file.
